Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

I was doing some web development this morning and after installing some software I needed to do a restart. After the machine came back up, I tried to access the local site that I had been working on, but it was trying to download “index.php” rather than serving it up in my browser, which was weird.

I opened up IIS and for some reason my Default Web Site was stopped. I tried starting it, but got this great error message, “unexpected error 0×8ffe2740 occurred.” Wonderful. Thankfully, the first result on Google was a MS site for this error and the reason. The problem is that something else had already taken port 80, so my site couldn’t use it. (As an aside, you’d think IIS could catch this error a little better, its not a very exotic situation). So I switched my site to port 8080 and it worked, but I still wanted to find out what was using port 80.

After running “netstat -a” from the command line, I could definitely see that something was using it, but didn’t know what. If you run “netstat -a -b” you will get a list of all ports, and the program thats using it as well, and low and behold, Skype had decided to use port 80. I quit Skype and my web site started with no problem. I believe that Skype searches for an open port to use when it starts up, so it must have gotten to port 80 before IIS could and took it, lame.